Six Comedies and other texts

Paris, BnF, Latin 7900A

Date: end of the 9th or beginning of the 10th century

Place of origin: Northern Italy, perhaps Milan

Parchment manuscript, 155 folia, 340 x 270 mm, Carolingian minuscule, Latin.

Contents: The manuscript consists of four parts:

I the Six Comedies of Publius Terentius Afer on f. 1r-26v;

II works of Q. Horatius Flaccus on f. 27r-56v;

III Lucan’s Pharsalia and Juvenal’s Satyres on f. 57r-111v;

IV Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii with the large commentary tradition attributed to Remigius of Auxerre on f. 112r-155v.

Special features: All the texts assembled in this codex are provided with ample commentary, roughly contemporary with the main text. Martianus’s De nuptiis has a particularly rich commentary: the tradition attributed to Remigius, who compiled many commentaries by collecting and collating earlier traditions and merging them into a new one. The pages are filled to the brim with text [see glosses and commentaries]. The liberal arts are illustrated at the beginning of each chapter with pen drawings.

Martianus Capella and his allegorical encyclopaedia

Martianus Capella is an author from Carthago, North Arfica, in the 5th century, a province of the Roman empire until the Vandals took over in 439 AD. Only one of his works survived: a work titled De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, “About the marriage of Philology and Mercury”. In this work, the story is told about the god Mercury marrying the earthly maiden Philology, a personification of earthly knowledge and science. In this allegory, Mercury stands for the body of knowledge connected to language, or the trivium, Philology for the body of knowledge connected to number, or the quadrivium. Together, the couple personifies perfect knowledge. In the story, the couple receives a curious gift from the gods to celebrate their marriage: seven maidens come to present their knowledge at the banquet. The maidens are personifications of the seven Liberal Arts, the arts of the trivium and of the quadrivium. Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic are the three arts of language, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Music are the four arts of number. For this exhibition, the author Martianus is crucial because he is one of the most important medieval sources for the establishment of the curriculum of the Seven Liberal Arts. Furthermore, especially his treatment of the art of Dialectic was elaborately commented upon.

Here you see the opening of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis on f. 112r.

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Nota bene: the main text of Martianus Capella occupies the small column on the left. Its beginning is missing because the page is damaged. Perhaps the text started with a decorated initial that was cut out by a later dealer in manuscripts or manuscript’s pages. The wide column on the right is the commentary of Remigius. The commentary has become a solid block of text instead of a series of notes spread in the margin.

Here (f. 116r-v) you can see that the parchment used for this manuscript was not of the best quality: the natural edges of the skin are visible as the edges of the page. From the fact that the text carefully follows the edge of the page we can conclude that the page was not damaged, but that an ‘incomplete’ page was used in the quire.

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Decorated initials in animal style (f. 120v) mark the beginning of a new book, both for the main text (narrow column on the right) and for the commentary (wide column on the left).

On the next page, the book on Grammar starts with a fanciful initial R (f. 128r). A dragon bearing a remarkably strong resemblance to a crocodile is tickled with a spear!

Another one of these fanciful initials, this time an E made with two peacocks, is used to mark the beginning of a new section in Juvenal’s Satyres on f. 109v.

On f. 132v a full page illustration marks the beginning of book IV, on Dialectica. Two students tentatively approach Lady Dialectica, who is armed with a hook (to reel people in) and has snakes coming out of her sleeve (with which she attacks her opponents)! She is a dangerous lady.

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